"Symbolic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... man; the gulf between that which calls, and that which is thus called into being; between that which makes in its own image and that which is made in that image. It is better to keep the word creation for that calling out of nothing which is the imagination of God; except it be as an occasional symbolic expression, whose daring is fully recognized, of the likeness of man's work to the work of his maker. The necessary unlikeness between the creator and the created holds within it the equally necessary likeness of the thing made to him ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... majestically savage woman, in whom jealousy and revenge are intensified to heroic proportions. That is the inevitable theatrical treatment of the murderous heroine of the Saga. Ibsen's aim in The Vikings was purely theatrical, and not, as in his later dramas, also philosophically symbolic. Wagner's aim in Siegfried's Death was equally theatrical, and not, as it afterwards became in the dramas of which Siegfried's antagonist Wotan is the hero, likewise philosophically symbolic. The two master-dramatists therefore produce practically the same version of Brynhild. Thus on the second ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... the daily donning of the uniform was in very truth symbolic and inspiring; and once the muslin cap was adjusted, she felt herself magically surrounded by the atmosphere most conducive to the production of ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... old furniture, but rarely in houses. The high front door still retains its Ionic cornice; and the western entrance, looking on the bay, is surmounted by carved fruit and flowers, and is crowned, as is the roof, with that pineapple in whose symbolic wealth the rich merchants of the ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... four universal empires represented by great beasts. One after another the symbolic beasts arose, did their work, and gave place to the next scenes in the history. The angel clearly explained to Daniel the ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... "leave these abstruse studies; take off that symbolic coat, that tinsel crown; wash, comb your ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... says, "those of Ibsen's dramas which are sane and clear, but those generally termed symbolic have been unintelligible to me, and I have never found the pleasure in them which those may who can disentangle their intricate meaning." What a curious statement, in the light of the other preface, written ...
— Heath's Modern Language Series: Mariucha • Benito Perez Galdos
... obtruded upon by the stately main building of Howard University, of her structures the noblest. Observed from the high palisades or the low bed of the Potomac, that ever-present object of view from any point of the District is veritably "a city on a hill that cannot be hid,"—symbolic and typical of her mission. And then the inquiry comes as to her significance. Why ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... never attempted to exploit his "gift" and impressed most of those who came in contact with him with his apparent sincerity. If he duped others, it seemed he also duped himself. Moreover, and this was perhaps the secret of his continued success, his "visions" were invariably symbolic and mysterious; they possessed an adaptability of character that was truly Delphic. Indeed, his hearers were compelled to put their own interpretation upon his visions. The seer seldom pretended to understand or ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... a sailor sprang to the flagstaff whence the signal of distress had been flying since the morning when help from the Bridgewater had been hoped for, and hauled down the blue ensign, which was at once rehoisted with the union in the upper canton. "This symbolic expression of contempt for the Bridgewater and of confidence in the success of our voyage, I did not see without ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... Casada is avowedly based on the thirty-first chapter of Proverbs, and De los nombres de Cristo, the first part of which appeared simultaneously with La Perfecta Casada,[264] discusses the various symbolic names applied to the ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... perfectly thinkable, and systematic deductions, in themselves valid, may be made from concepts which contravene the facts of perception. We may suspect, perhaps, that even these concepts are framed by analogy out of suggestions found in sense, so that some symbolic relevance or proportion is kept, even in these dislocated speculations, to the matter of experience. It is like a new mythology; the purely fictitious idea has a certain parallelism and affinity to nature and moves in a human and familiar way. Both data and method are drawn from applicable ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... were symbolic, perhaps, of the more rapid rate at which the forces of society were soon to move. Over all Europe and America great events were shaping themselves with lightning speed. Tremendous changes political and economic, social and scientific, were ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... thoughts, this tacit race and religious aversion in which he had been bred. It rose now suddenly in front of him, as he sauntered from patch to patch of sunlight under the elms, like some huge, shadowy, and symbolic monument. He looked at it with wondering curiosity, as at something he had heard of all his life, but never seen before—an abhorrent spectacle, truly! The foundations upon which its dark bulk reared itself were ignorance, squalor, brutality and vice. Pigs wallowed in the mire before ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... over these papers was, however, to enhance in the bishop's mind a growing disposition to minimize the importance of all dated and explicit evidences and arguments for orthodox beliefs, and to resort to vague symbolic and liberal interpretations, and it was in this state that he came to his talk ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... friend, I prophesy it will not do always: a faculty is in you for a sort of speech which is itself action, an artistic sort. You tell us with piercing emphasis that man's soul is great; show us a great soul of a man, in some work symbolic of such: this is the seal of such a message, and you will feel by and by that you are called to this. I long to see some concrete Thing, some Event, Man's Life, American Forest, or piece of Creation, which this Emerson loves and wonders at, well Emersonized, ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... make it s, she. This, too, may, for all we know, be a case of phonetic symbolism, and, if so, it should be treated on its own merits. The lengthening of the vowel in the subjunctive mood was formerly represented by Professor Curtius as a symbolic expression of hesitation, but he has lately recalled that explanation as untenable. Ipointed out that when in Hebrew we meet with such forms as Piel and Pual, Hiphil and Hophal, we feel tempted ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... semi-medieval view. He intended to transform these ceremonies and to have them fit "the pure Word of God." In his primary intention they were to be no longer objective works of grace, but were to have a subjective value only, a faith-significance. They were to be conceived as pictorial, symbolic ways of learning the one important truth of salvation—God's grace and forgiveness; for God deigns, he said, to speak to his immature creatures by signs and pictures. But the imperial sway of the past powerfully moved him; his own conservative ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... were refreshed by the gossipy peasants, who repeated the tales that had come down as ancestral memories. In wandering around the site of his proposed labors Sir Arthur noticed some ruined walls, the great gypsum blocks of which were engraved with curious symbolic characters, crowning the southern slope of a hill known as Kephala, overlooking the ancient site of Knossos, the city of Minos. It was the prelude to the discovery of the ruins of a palace, the most wonderful archeological ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... may be. But to him belongs philosophy in fiction. His people not merely live, but they live in thought. One can see them from myriad points of view. They are suggestive. There is soul in them and around them. They are interpretative and symbolic. And he who made them, those wonderful quickly-moving figures, made them for his own pleasure, and has never asked the public what they wanted, has never cared to know what they wanted, has never allowed the public ...
— The Soul of Man • Oscar Wilde
... him. Sometimes a man less well known, but elegant and sought after, one of those who are called according to the different epochs, "true gentleman," or "perfect knight," or "dandy," or something else, seated himself, in his turn, before the symbolic cake. Each of them, during this ephemeral reign, exhibited greater consideration toward the husband; then, when the hour of his fall had arrived, he passed on the knife toward the other, and mingled once more with the crowd ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... the heather. A shower had just skimmed by, but now the sun shone brightly, and the air smelt of the pines and the grass. On a stone under the trees sat a young lady sketching. We have learned to think of women in a sort of symbolic transfiguration, based on clothes; and one of the readiest ways in which we conceive our mistress is as a composite thing, principally petticoats. But humanity has triumphed over clothes; the look, the touch of a dress has become alive; and the woman who stitched ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... open window in a nightdress that she had found in one of the chests—a frail, yellowish thing with many frills of cobwebby lace made and worn by some dead woman on a forgotten bridal. It was symbolic of Hazel's whole life that she came in this way both to Undern and the Mountain—as bare of woman's regalia as a winter leaf is ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... more than a mathematical point; in duration but a fleeting shadow; he is a mere reed shaken in the winds of force. But, as Pascal long ago remarked, although a mere reed, he is a thinking reed; and in virtue of that wonderful capacity of thought, he has the power of framing for himself a symbolic conception of the universe, which, although doubtless highly imperfect and inadequate as a picture of the great whole, is yet sufficient to serve him as a chart for the guidance of his practical affairs. It has taken long ages of toilsome and often fruitless labour ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... There is exposed once again, and for the last time, the coffin. All eyes survey the record of name, of sex, of age, and the day of departure from earth—records how shadowy! and dropped into darkness as if messages addressed to worms. Almost at the very last comes the symbolic ritual, tearing and shattering the heart with volleying discharges, peal after peal, from the final artillery of woe. The coffin is lowered into its home; it has disappeared from all eyes but those that look down into the abyss of the grave. The sacristan ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... in our contemplating in them the purity of the intelligible truth: and this not only in natural knowledge, but also in that which we obtain by revelation. For Dionysius says (Coel. Hier. i) that "the Divine glory shows us the angelic hierarchies under certain symbolic figures, and by its power we are brought back to the single ray of light," i.e. to the simple knowledge of the intelligible truth. It is in this sense that we must understand the statement of Gregory that "contemplatives do not carry along with them the shadows ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... tree, if not at the fruit itself. The higher the position in which one finds oneself transplanted, the greater is the suffering. Everyday necessity is the stagnant pool of life—no lovely picture reflects itself therein. Lieutenant, love, and lack of money—that is a symbolic triangle, or much the same as the half of the shattered die of Fortune. This the lieutenant felt most poignantly, and this was the reason he leant his head against the window, ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... are seven yellow, five-pointed stars with three centered in the top red border, three centered in the bottom red border, and one on a red disk superimposed at the center of the flag; there is also a symbolic nutmeg pod on the hoist-side triangle (Grenada is the world's second-largest producer of nutmeg, after Indonesia); the seven stars represent the seven ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... astrological power of the planet Mars was of course ascribed to it in the same connection with its red color. The reader may be interested to see the notice, in 'Modern Painters,' of Turner's constant use of the same symbol; partly an expression of his own personal feeling, partly, the employment of a symbolic language known to all careful readers of solar ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... such as official government facilities with formidable security, and toward softer targets—schools, restaurants, places of worship, and nodes of public transportation—where innocent civilians gather and which are not always well secured. Specific targets vary, but they tend to be symbolic and often selected because they will produce mass ...
— National Strategy for Combating Terrorism - September 2006 • United States
... for solemn occasions, and graceful chasubles on which embroidered flowers surrounded symbolic letters on a yellowish ground, which had become cream-colored, although it had originally been white. Some second-hand dealers were there, two or three men with dirty beards, and a fat woman with a big stomach, one of those women who deal in second-hand finery, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... course, to forget one's past work, to scrap the models, and to start feverishly afresh. The only method left untried was the symbolic. That is to say, to hint at the eighteenth century and to suggest that through the doors on the stage existed the London of 1728. The scene demanded to be simple and one which, with slight modifications in doors and windows, remained before the audience for the whole ...
— The Beggar's Opera - to which is prefixed the Musick to each Song • John Gay
... "Unknowable." Corresponding to small objects, a piece of rock for example, where the sides, top, and bottom can be considered as practically all present in consciousness at once, and large ones, like the earth, where they cannot, our author divides conceptions into complete and symbolic. Great magnitudes and classes of objects also produce symbolic conceptions which, while indispensable to reasoning, often lead us into error. "We habitually mistake our symbolic conceptions for real ones." The former "are legitimate, provided that by some cumulative or indirect ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... thousands of charming little frivolities into fashion; he taught the ladies the charming and poetic language of flowers, and made it a symbolic means of conversation and correspondence in the queen's circle. He also, to the great delight of the court, invented the alphabet of gems; in this alphabet each gem represented its initial letter, and, by combinations, names and devices were formed, which ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... handbook of the principles of arrangement, with brief comment on the periods of design which have most influenced printing. Treats of harmony, balance, proportion, and rhythm; motion; symmetry and variety; ornament, esthetic and symbolic. 37 illustrations; 46 review questions; ...
— Compound Words - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #36 • Frederick W. Hamilton
... completed the picture. The mingling, in the dress, of extreme simplicity with the cunningest artifice, and the greater daring and joie de vivre which it expressed, as compared with the dress of pre-war days, made it characteristic and symbolic:—a ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... him. [Forster, i. 165; Faasmann, Leben und Thaten des allerdurchlauchtigsten gc. Konigs von Preussen Frederici Wilhelmi (Hambug und Breslau, 1735), pp. 223, 319.] Fancy that scene in History; Friedrich Wilhelm for comic-symbolic Dramaturgist. Gods and men (or at least Houyhnhnm horses) might have saluted it; with a Homeric laugh,—so huge and vacant is it, with a suspicion of real humor too:—but the men were not permitted, on parade, more than a silent grin, or general irrepressible rustling murmur; ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... the Movement of Cosmic Energy—the one based upon the exercise of Consciousness and Will, and the other based upon Mathematical Sequence. This is why that system of instruction known as Free Masonry starts by erecting the two symbolic pillars Jachin and Boaz—Jachin so called from the root "Yak" meaning "One," indicating the Mathematical element of Law; and Boaz, from the root "Awaz" meaning "Voice" indicating Personal element of Free Will. These names are taken from the description ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... frequently on artificial mounds, being probably intended for religious or ceremonial purposes. The walls both within and without are elaborately decorated, sometimes with symbolic figures. Sometimes officials in ceremonial costumes are seen apparently performing religious rites. These are often accompanied by inscriptions in low relief, with the peculiar Mayan characters which some archeologists call "calculiform hieroglyphs" ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... case, the Lord himself gave both the parable and its explanation; he became his own interpreter. The Master takes us, like little children, by the hand and leads us through all the turnings of his first symbolic lesson, lest in our inexperience we should miss our way. The Son of God not only gave himself as a sacrifice for sin; he also laboured as a patient painstaking teacher of the ignorant: he is the Apostle as well as the High Priest of our profession. His instructions ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... "My little Asticot," he whispered to me, "have I really come to this, to sit at the feet of an acting pro-sub-vice-deputy infant Gamaliel and be taught the elements of symbolic poetry?" ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... smell of brimstone; breaks nobody's shins, breeds no athletic monsters; its only danger is that of failing, which for generous blood is enough to mould skilful action. And among the Brackenshaw archers the prizes were all of the nobler symbolic kind; not properly to be carried off in a parcel, degrading honor into gain; but the gold arrow and the silver, the gold star and the silver, to be worn for a long time in sign of achievement and then transferred ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... staircase, with his hand on the banisters, standing on the lobby. But the door of the chamber of death clapped angrily, and he went down to the parlour, where he examined the holy candle for a while, with a tipsy gravity, and then with something of that reverential feeling for the symbolic, which is not uncommon in rakes and scamps, he thoughtfully locked it up in a press, where were accumulated all sorts of obsolete rubbish—soiled packs of cards, disused tobacco pipes, broken powder flasks, his military ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu
... of many a fierce struggle against persecution, of conflict with the dragoons of Claverhouse. All these, whose grandfathers had stood in arms for widely different causes, marched together on Antrim, an embodiment of Wolfe Tone's dream of a united Ireland. Their flags were green, vividly symbolic of the blending of the Protestant orange with the ancient Irish blue. M'Cracken, with such troops behind him, might march hopefully, even though he knew that the cavalry, infantry, and artillery were hurrying against him along the banks of the Six Mile Water, ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... reappeared, and under Jack's last communication was written, "Thank you!" He could hardly write "Welcome!" in return. It was strictly a case of nothing more to say by either duelist. In an impulse he slipped the sheet, with its palm symbolic of desert mystery and oasis luxuriance, ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... Breton funeral ceremony was replete with symbolic meaning and ritual, which have been carried down through the Middle Ages to the present time. As soon as the head of the family had ceased to breathe, a great fire was lit in the courtyard, and the mattress upon which he had expired was burned. Pitchers of water ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... on that score; the family is extinct. The last Count of Spada, moreover, made me his heir, bequeathing to me this symbolic breviary, he bequeathed to me all it contained; no, no, make your mind satisfied on that point. If we lay hands on this fortune, we ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... was ablaze with decorations, vibrant with enthusiasm. Men, women, children, turned out to do the Vigilantes honor. A float symbolic of Fort Gunnybags ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... be so or not, there can be no doubt that the "animism" of the early Egyptians assumed its precise and clear-cut distinctive features as the result of the growth of ideas suggested by the attempts to make mummies and statues of the dead and symbolic offerings of food and other ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... was awaiting the young couple with burning torches in her hand. In case no wedding meal had been served at the bride's house, the company now sat down to it. To prognosticate the desired fertility of the union, cakes of sesame were distributed. The same symbolic meaning attached to the quince, which, according to Solon's law, the bride had to eat. After the meal the couple retired to the thalamos, where for the first time the bride unveiled herself to her husband. Before the door of the bridal chamber epithalamia were sung, a charming ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... tiara in lieu of the mitre, and exchanging the chasuble for the pontifical cope, went to occupy his throne on the platform at the entry of the left transept. He thence dominated the whole assembly, through which a quiver sped when after the prayers of the ritual, he once more rose erect. Beneath the symbolic, triple crown, in the golden sheathing of his cope, he seemed to have grown taller. Amidst sudden and profound silence, which only feverish heart-beats interrupted, he raised his arm with a very noble gesture and pronounced the papal benediction in a slow, loud, full voice, which ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... minds was sacrifice and its elaborate rituals. Free speculative thinking was thus subordinated to the service of the sacrifice, and the result was the production of the most fanciful sacramental and symbolic ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... or nationality cramped him, the first great Cosmopolite. We cannot sufficiently admire the infinite adaptability, the universal knowledge of humanity, the boundless sympathy with man, which are everywhere manifest in the original Christian philosophy of life. What a depth of meaning in the symbolic bread and wine, typical of the life which flows through eternity and all its changes, of human love and birth and death, of bounteous, beautiful nature, with its continually renewed strength—the whole given, not in funereal guise, not with sombre ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... into the origin of hot cross buns. These cakes, which are now solely associated with the Christian Good Friday, are traceable to the remotest period of pagan history. Cakes were offered by ancient Egyptians to their moon-goddess; and these had imprinted on them a pair of horns, symbolic of the ox at the sacrifice of which they were offered on the altar, or of the horned moon-goddess, the equivalent of Ishtar of the Assyro-Babylonians. The Greeks offered such sacred cakes to Astarte and other divinities. This cake they called bous (ox), in allusion to the ox-symbol ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... in the act of brushing off his hands again, in a sort of symbolic gesture of completion, when a ground-car stopped before the Ministry. A stout man got out. A rather startlingly pretty girl followed. They advanced to ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... contains many passages such as these. We have space to quote but one of the poems complete, to show the manner in which Mr. De Vere unites the real, the symbolic, and the external, with the spiritual. Like most of his poems, it is marked by artistic finish and grace, and many of the lines have a natural beauty ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... resolution of the face, the prim perfection of the dress, judged by the Quakerish standard of its owner. Lady Lucy almost always wore gloves—white or gray. In Sir James's mind the remembrance of them took a symbolic importance. What use in expecting the wearer of them to handle the blood and mire of Juliet Sparling's story ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... minister Of spirit's joys, was his, reserved, restrained. His song was like the sword Excalibur Of his symbolic knight; trenchant, unstained. It shook the world of wordly baseness, smote The Christless heathendom of huckstering days. There is no harshness in that mellow note, No blot upon those bays; For loyal love and knightly valour rang Through rich ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 15, 1892 • Various
... of adoration are mentioned. They sacrificed animals and maize, but also men and women, and these not only captives taken in war but also their own children, smearing the idol with the blood. (In other quarters of the globe this is a symbolic act showing that the idol and the worshippers all partake in the same life.) Some tribes were fiercer than others, and practised cannibalism more extensively. They were also well provided with ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... and surveyed him with that impatient wonder which he always felt when he used his favorite symbolic speech. "There's no question of my living up to the thought of any woman's but my wife's," he said, bitterly, and ...
— Madelon - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... smiling apologetically, and giving her hat a tug of determination symbolic of her being ready for anything, especially America. "I think I must have gone to sleep. Have you—" she hesitated and dropped her voice. "Are they—are the Clouston ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... are painted along conventional lines; the favorite colors for the inua masks are red (Karekteoak),[11] black (Auktoak), green (Cungokyoak), white (Katektoak), and blue (Taukrektoak), in the order named. These colors[12] may hold a sacred or symbolic significance. The inua masks are decorated with some regard to the natural colors of the human face, but in the masks of the tunghat the imagination of the artist runs riot. The same is true of the comic masks, which are rendered as ...
— The Dance Festivals of the Alaskan Eskimo • Ernest William Hawkes
... within the year, Braun had announced the founding of an association for clearing the Detroit slum area where he had been born—the plainest kind of symbolic suicide: Let's not have any more Abner Longmans Brauns born down here. It depressed me to see it happen, for next on Joan's agenda for Braun was an entry into politics as a fighting liberal—a New Dealer twenty years too late. ...
— One-Shot • James Benjamin Blish
... condescended to indulge a visible superstition, for the benefit of the multitude; and, after the ruin of Paganism, they were no longer restrained by the apprehension of an odious parallel. The first introduction of a symbolic worship was in the veneration of the cross, and of relics. The saints and martyrs, whose intercession was implored, were seated on the right hand if God; but the gracious and often supernatural favors, which, in the popular belief, were showered round their ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... President Jose RAMOS-HORTA (since 20 May 2007); note - the president plays a largely symbolic role but is able to veto legislation, dissolve parliament, and call national elections head of government: Prime Minister Kay Rala Xanana GUSMAO (since 8 August 2007), note - he formerly used the name Jose Alexandre ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... perfectly straight flagpole graced the extensive "front-yard," and from its peak floated the flag of Trigger Island,—a great white pennon with a red heart in the centre, symbolic of love, courage, fidelity. But on the tip of Split Mountain the Stars and Stripes still waves ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... own valuation as Bobby. Other women frequently insisted upon their own interpretations. He looked upon this as a form of disloyalty. Lady Hortense had once decried his taste for Tennyson; that, and her persistent use of a perfume which he disliked had been symbolic to him of a difference in temperament. Bobby had no predilections for perfumes or poets. She blindly accepted his judgment of all things, and if she sometimes failed to conform to his wishes, it was through forgetfulness and not opposition. He gloried in her plasticity; after ...
— The Honorable Percival • Alice Hegan Rice
... furnished with statuettes of different saints and has mural decorations by Kano Masanobu. There are very unusual features connected with this temple. The so-called apartments are in two sets,—one attached to the main building with pictorial sliding screens symbolic of Chinese sages and other subjects by Kano. There are also drawings of birds and trees, and ornaments done by celebrated artists. Folding screens are in common use. One artistic group represents three religious teachers, Confucius, Buddha, and Lao Tze. After showing these art treasures to ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... pictures in this strange and lovely book are infinite, so endlessly varied are the ways in which they impress us. In our highest moments they seem to be definitely, almost consciously, sacerdotal, as though the symbolic acts of a solemn cosmic ritual, in which the universe is revealed visibly at worship. Were man to make a practice of rising at dawn and contemplating in silence and alone the rising of the sun, he would need no other religion. The rest ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... year 1893 or thereabouts. It is a piece of self-caricature, a series of echoes from all the earlier plays, an exaggeration of manner to the pitch of mannerism. Moreover, in his treatment of his symbolic motives, Ibsen did exactly what he had hitherto, with perfect justice, plumed himself upon never doing: he sacrificed the surface reality to the underlying meaning. Take, for instance, the history of Rubek's statue and its development into a group. In actual sculpture this ...
— When We Dead Awaken • Henrik Ibsen
... lesson of that death is the same as that of the other king's deliverance. Hezekiah 'went unto the house of the Lord,' and found Him a very present help in trouble. Sennacherib was slain in the house of his god. The two pictures of the worshippers and their fates are symbolic of the meaning of the whole story. Sennacherib had dared Jehovah to try His strength against him and his deities. The challenge was accepted, and that bloody corpse before the idol that could not help preaches a ghastly sermon on the text, 'They that make them are like ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... often used in Logic instead of concrete terms, not only in Symbolic Logic where the science is treated algebraically (as by Dr. Venn in his Symbolic Logic), but in ordinary manuals; so that it may be well to explain the use of them before ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... is what "France is like." The whole civilian part of the nation seems merged in one symbolic figure, carrying help and hope to the fighters or passionately bent above the wounded. The devotion, the self-denial, seem instinctive; but they are really based on a reasoned knowledge of the situation and on an unflinching estimate of values. All France knows today ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... for the ethereally symbolic had not strongly manifested itself in Virginia City, yet under Professor Trask's direction "The Cantata of the Flowers" had been in active rehearsal for weeks. The professor relied upon the school-children for chorus material, ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... great symbolic happiness of a higher happiness and highest hope. For to many is marriage promised, and more ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... seen by reference to Fig. 217 that the painted figures are partially pictorial, the conventional scenes including the sun, the moon, and stars. The more conventional parts of the design are very curious and without doubt are symbolic. The border of fret work is Mexican in style. The sun, which is only partially exposed above the horizon, is outlined in red and is surrounded by red rays. The figures supposed to represent the moon and the stars are in black. In the illustration the reds of ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... watching the white mists creeping up the blue fields. The sky was lucent as a crystal, and the purple would not die out of the west until nearly midnight. Evelyn would have liked to have stayed with him in the twilight, for as the landscape darkened, his strange figure grew symbolic, and his words, whether by beauty of verbal expression or the manner with which they were spoken, seemed to bring the unseen world nearer. The outside world seemed to slip back, to become subordinate as earth becomes subordinate to the sky when the stars come. ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... around their perished Air Trust plant, a throng of silent, earnest watchers stood, with faces illumined by the symbolic, sacrificial flames—a throng of emancipated workers, of toilers from whose bowed shoulders now forever had been lifted the frightful menace of ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... series, we did see crowned, with a pinch of snuff tempering the solemnities. That Coronation once well done suffices all his descendants hitherto. Such an expense of money,—of diluted mendacity too! Such haranguing, gesturing, symbolic fugling, all grown half false:—avoid lying, even with your eyes, or knees, or the coat upon your back, so far as ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... second chamber, with its riverside open to the air, and reached a tiny apartment, where he motioned us to a divan. We squatted and looked round. Some empty bottles were the only furniture. But on the wall hung the picture we had come to see. It was a symbolic tree, and perhaps as much like a tree as what it symbolised was like the universe. Embedded in its trunk and branches were coloured circles and signs, and from them grew leaves and flowers of various hues. Below was a garden lit by a rising ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... had been only a vague name until a few days ago, when a symbolic group of his had been placed in the entrance hall of the Agricultural Institution, and had at once attracted attention. The critics spoke of him as a new force in art, and a bust of the famous dancer by him was therefore, ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... was vexed and disappointed at her failure to take the flood. Alma, too, had regretful moments; but she fought against the feeling with all her strength. Today she all but found courage to throw these newspapers into the fire; it would be a final sacrifice, a grave symbolic act, and might bring her peace. Yet she could not. Long years hence, would it not be a legitimate pride to show these things to her children? A misgiving mingled with the thought, but her reluctance prevailed. She made up a parcel, ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... theoretic base for this symbolic establishment of the relational quality of tones, and he dimly guessed that the order of the harmonics or upper tones of a given tonic would furnish a principle for forming the familiar major scale,[329] but his knowledge of ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... imperial monument. But Alexander bade him leave Mount Athos alone. As it was, it might be christened "Xerxes, his Folly," and, for his part, he preferred to regard Mount Caucasus, and the Himalayas, and the river Don as the symbolic memorials of his acts and deeds.—Plutarch's Moralia. "De Alexandri Fortuna et ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... very, very beautiful. Peter sat on the bed and looked at it, as a devotee before a shrine. In itself it was very beautiful, a magic thing of blue colour and deep light and pure shadow and clear, lovely form. Peter loved it for itself, and for its symbolic character. For it was a symbol of the world of great loveliness that did, he knew, exist. When he had been turned out of that world into a grey and dusty place, he had kept that one thing, to link him with loveliness and light. Peter was a materialist: he ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... their pictorial rolls, as the symbol of the Great Spirit; and no important rite or ceremony is undertaken without an offering of tobacco. This weed is lit with the sacred element, generated anew on each occasion, from percussion. To light and to put out this fire, is the symbolic language for the opening and closing of every important civil or religious public transaction, and it is the most sacred rite known to them. It is never done without an appeal, which has the characteristics of prayer, ...
— Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... Climbing palms and massive creepers, splashed with orange, scarlet, and gold, tumble in masses from lofty branches, and the dazzling Bougainvillea flings curtains of roseate purple over wall and gateway. A dense thicket of frangipanni scents the air with the symbolic blossoms, shining like stars from grey-green boughs of sharp-cut leaves. A copse of splendid tree-ferns flanks the forest-like plantation known as "The Thousand Palms," and beneath dusky avenues of waringen (a variety of the banyan species, which strikes staff-like boughs into the earth and ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... aspersions, to listen to so many litanies and hymns, to parade through such endless halls and while being elevated to the rank of celestial beings, to be crowned with so many crowns in turn and decorated with all kinds of fillets and symbolic adornments. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the Lincoln Memorial and of a memorial bridge from the base of the Lincoln Monument to Arlington would be an appropriate and symbolic expression of the union of the North and the South at the Capital of the Nation. I urge upon Congress the appointment of a commission to undertake these national improvements, and to submit a plan for their execution; and when the plan has been submitted and approved, ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Separation must be manifest; it is meant as a witness to others and ourselves; it must find expression in the external, if internally it is to be real and strong. It is the characteristic of a symbolic action that it not merely expresses a feeling, but nourishes and strengthens the feeling to which it corresponds. When the soul enters the fellowship of God, it feels the need of external separation, sometimes even from what appears ...
— Holy in Christ - Thoughts on the Calling of God's Children to be Holy as He is Holy • Andrew Murray
... simple pictures to symbols. Chinese writing has never advanced beyond this stage. Its prodigious type-case of more than forty-two thousand characters contains, therefore, only a series of pictures, direct and symbolic, all highly conventionalized, but recognizable in their earlier forms. To represent "wife" the Chinaman combines the two signs for "woman" and "broom"; to represent "home" he makes a picture of a pig under a roof! The Egyptian and Mexican systems of writing, though very different to the eye, were ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman
... pole lay with one end supported on a trestle, and women were engaged in wreathing it from the top downwards with wildflowers. The instincts of merry England lingered on here with exceptional vitality, and the symbolic customs which tradition has attached to each season of the year were yet a reality on Egdon. Indeed, the impulses of all such outlandish hamlets are pagan still: in these spots homage to nature, self-adoration, frantic gaieties, fragments of Teutonic rites to ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... mind of the sufferer—will seldom fail to discover the influence of sexual forces and sexual attractions which, while capable of causing disorders of mind and of conduct, show themselves only obscurely and indirectly, as, for example, in dreams or in symbolic form. ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... the symbolic animal, usually assigned to him, occupy nearly the whole of their respective pages. They are taken from Byzantine models, of which, as Westwood points out, nothing remains but the attitudes, the fashion of ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... followed his business for many years with great credit, under this Scriptural device; and Dr. Dolliver, being the apprentice, pupil, and humble friend of the learned Swinnerton's old age, had inherited the symbolic snake, and much other ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... famous at home and abroad: but his peculiar feat, which had commended him at Reinsberg, was an Edition of HORACE: exquisite old FLACCUS brought to perfection, as it were; all done with vignettes, classical borderings, symbolic marginal ornaments, in fine taste and accuracy, the Text itself engraved; all by the exquisite burin of Pine. ["London, 1737" (Biographie Universelle, xxxiv. 465).] This Edition had come out last year, famous over the world; and was by and by, as rumor bore, to be followed by a VIRGIL ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... to be magnificent indeed. The little incident said more for the richness of Minook than all the General's blowing; they forgot that what was lost would amount to less than fifty cents. The fact that it was gold—Minook gold—gave it a symbolic value not to ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... friend, a young actor whom he had left in Stuttgart, possessed a similar weapon, the blade of which bore the syllables Biades. It seemed that Karl, even without the symbolic help of the daggers, had again found the complement of his own 'Alkibiadesian' individuality, this time in the young booby Hornstein, and it is very probable that the two, whilst in Sion, had imagined they were acting an 'Alkibiadesian' scene before Socrates. His comedy showed me that ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... the Black Suitcase simply because it was the perfect example of the proverbial Little Black Box—the box that Did Things. As a test question in an examination, the Little Black Box performs a useful function. The examiner draws a symbolic electronic circuit. Somewhere in the circuit, instead of drawing the component that is supposed to be there, he draws a Little Black Box. Then he defines the wave-form, voltage, and amperage entering the circuit and defines whatever is coming out. ...
— With No Strings Attached • Gordon Randall Garrett (AKA David Gordon)
... Shakespeare, to obtain some notion of that system of the universe from which they drew so many of their analogies. The symbolism of Dante appears to us unnaturally strained until we know that the science of his day saw everything as symbolic. ...
— Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus • Robert Steele
... was given to these reflections by the discovery, in a neighbouring pew, of the serious profile and neatly-trimmed beard of Mr. Percy Gryce. There was something almost bridal in his own aspect: his large white gardenia had a symbolic air that struck Lily as a good omen. After all, seen in an assemblage of his kind he was not ridiculous-looking: a friendly critic might have called his heaviness weighty, and he was at his best in the attitude of vacant passivity which brings out ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... for instance, that this one was crimson, the other blue; not quite so hard to say that this one affects us as crimson does, that other as blue does. And yet we can see, I think, that by chasing our impressions to their source, there might be some way of presenting them in symbolic form. There might be some way of reducing what we feel from the Greeks, or Chinese, or Celts, into a word, a sentence; of writing it down even in a single hieroglyph, of which the elements would be such as should convey to something in us behind the intellect just the indefinable feeling either ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... center of a formal parapet at the end of the basin of water, sixty feet from the fountain, is a colossal figure symbolic of the setting sun, Helios, the great orb having thrown off the nebulous mass that subsequently ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... philosophy can change, and while theories and systems rise and pass away, the eternal problems present themselves ever anew clothed in the eternal mystery. But little discernment is needed to enable us to perceive how poor and symbolic are the thoughts of the multitude. Half in pity, half in contempt, we rise to higher regions only to discover that wherever we may be there also are the laws and the limitations of our being; and that in whatsoever sanctuaries ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... It is probably in this capacity, i.e., as the friend of the dead, that the dog-headed ape appears seated upon the top of the standard of the Balance in which the heart of the deceased is being weighed against the feather symbolic of Ma[a]t; for the commonest titles of the god are "lord of divine books," "lord of divine words," i.e., the formulae which make the deceased to be obeyed by friend and foe alike in the next world. In later times, when Thoth came to be represented by the ibis ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge
... habit of vivifying the inanimate is the more subtle artifice of transfiguring or magnifying concrete objects, so that they become symbolic without ceasing to be real. This blending of the actual and the figurative is seen in the description of the King ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo
... excuse for the symbolic title, if indeed an excuse be necessary. May the title be a reminder that we are to depart as little as possible from classic ground; may it, through its brevity and signification, modify the demands of the friends of art ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... centuple use and meaning. What! has my stove and pepper-pot a false bottom? I cry you mercy, good shoe-box! I did not know you were a jewel-case. Chaff and dust begin to sparkle, and are clothed about with immortality. And there is a joy in perceiving the representative or symbolic character of a fact, which no base fact or event can ever give. There are no days so memorable as those which vibrated to some stroke of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... spare bed to be made up "in case anything should happen," while the crystal glasses were kept on the second from the top, instead of the top shelf, in the china closet. Rebecca had had to stand on a chair to reach them; now she could do it by stretching; and this is symbolic of the way in which she unconsciously scaled the walls of Miss Miranda's dogmatism ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... these: (1) That many of the pictures of the hieroglyphics stand for the names of the objects actually delineated; (2) that other pictures are sometimes only symbolic; (3) that plural numbers are represented by repetition; (4) that numerals are represented by dashes; (5) that hieroglyphics may read either from the right or from the left, but always from the direction in which the animal and human ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... the ground itself, the story of the settlement and the first century's life of Salem and the surrounding places, a delicate suffusion of the marvellous will insensibly steal over the severe facts of the record, giving them a half-legendary color. This arises partly from the imaginative and symbolic way of looking at things of the ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... nearly all the minor carved ornaments, though grotesque and human figures sometimes took their place. The gargoyles through which the roof-water was discharged clear of the building, were almost always composed in the form of hideous monsters; and symbolic beasts, like the oxen in the towers of Laon, or monsters like those which peer from the tower balustrades of Notre Dame, were employed with some mystical significance in various parts of the building. But the capitals corbels, crockets, and finials were mostly composed of floral or foliage ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... Confessions of Faith, or Symbolic Books, of the Roman-Catholic, Greek, and principal ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler
... Very symbolic, Jason thought. He was also bothered by the realization that he hadn't remembered to look for something coming in. Then, too, he couldn't even identify the beast from its charred remains. He glanced around, hoping he would be able to fire ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... questioned their hearts, then scrambled up the rock and seated themselves to come to an understanding. Their figures stood out very sharply, looking as if they were alone in the middle of the wide horizon, and assuming a sort of symbolic dignity in that vast expanse of ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... wainscot line is set off with the sinuous body of the serpent, which not only lends itself well to such a purpose of ornamentation, but was a symbolic reminder to the Indians of that old serpent, the devil, the father of lies and evil, who beguiled our first parents in the ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... knapsack and he took from it a beautiful belt of pure white wampum, uncommon in size, a full five feet in length, five inches wide, and covered with many thousands of beads, woven in symbolic figures. He held it up and the eyes ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler
... life of Christ and the Virgin still made the central and most important topic, there were added scenes from the lives of the saints, those who were regarded as the patrons of the city or those to whom the edifice was dedicated being most frequently chosen. New symbolic designs were made showing the flight of time by seasons and months; others represented the virtues, and even the customs and habits of the people were sometimes introduced. There were also humorous representations, even on sacred ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... and deftly cut the leading string, as a practical demonstration of the favour in which "sermonising" was held at Hurst, and the whole band stood and screamed with laughter as the would-be preacher retraced her steps to the bottom of the hill, and started afresh on her symbolic climb! ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... which constitutes his canvas, he will limn you a full-rigged ship in two colors, a portrait of the heavyweight champion in three, or, if financially encouraged, the Statue of Liberty in four. These be, however, concessions to popular taste. His own predilection is for chaste floral designs of a symbolic character borne out and expounded by appropriate legends. Peter Quick Banta is a ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... designed to meet. This main reach of the flowing river, the Basin's hydrologic and scenic lifeline, is greatly menaced by rapid and inappropriate development along its banks, and through most of its length it is hard for people to reach. It has unique majesty and beauty and both historic and symbolic associations that warrant a special degree of protection for it, and warrant also the assurance of the kind of public appreciation and enjoyment the ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... by symbolic burial a man became regenerate, that he put off the old condition and entered into another that was new, by passing through the earth or a hole in the rocks, was very general, and it has continued to the present ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... founders, but these words classify them for the purpose of our investigation. The religious organizations have for their sole aim the deepening of the religious impulse, and the missionary objective of carrying this impulse to others. The semi-religious are built around religious and symbolic heroes, make a bid for the heroic and the gang spirit, and seek to inculcate more or less of religious truth by the sugar-coat method. The welfare type aims at the giving of all sorts of activity in order to ...
— The Boy and the Sunday School - A Manual of Principle and Method for the Work of the Sunday - School with Teen Age Boys • John L. Alexander
... the Lord"; a gracious picture of the nativity. (Edith Storey impersonates Mary the Virgin.) "I have seen him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps" and "They have builded him an altar in the evening dews and damps"—for these are given symbolic pageants of the ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... death she had been reviving in her mind, shocked to find them so few, her positive, personal recollections of him, and one of them now came back to her with a symbolic meaning. It had been a not uncommon occurrence in her childhood—a school picnic in the Black Rock woods; but this one stood out from all the others because, by what freak of chance she never knew, her father had gone with her instead of her mother. How proud she had been to ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... bandages. Several are costly, as for instance that marked 7875 of green jaspyr, said to have been extracted from the coffin of King Enantef. The next two cases (101, 102) contain various interesting fragments from mummies, including plain scarabaei and other symbolic amulets, and ornaments inscribed with the names of early Egyptian kings. Having noticed these revelations of Egypt's sepulchres, the visitor should turn at once to the eastern wall cases in which he will find a ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... more normal moods but of those moods into which we are thrown by the pressure upon us—apparently from outside the mechanical sequence of cause and effect—of certain mysterious Powers in the background of our experience, such as hitherto have only found symbolic and representative expression in the ritual of ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... representation of the Omniscient Transcendental Self, budding out new forms of thought in response to the conscientious efforts of, and the providing of suitable clothing by, the Physical Ego, as referred to in View No. 1, he would be obliged to make use of symbolic forms, and I want to make it quite clear that the description I am attempting must necessarily be clothed in symbolic language and reasoning, and must not be taken as in any way the key by which the door of "the sanctuary" may be opened; it is only possible by it to help the ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... These symbolic dances were not mere ceremonials for the Plains Indians; they were their one means of expressing their emotions en masse rhythmically, of maintaining their sense ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... unrolls in her left hand is the scroll of her prophecy. The two little figures holding a book, just behind her right shoulder, are genii, or spirits, symbolic of her inspiration. One reads eagerly from the volume while the other ...
— Michelangelo - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Master, With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... ram-headed bird, bearing between its green horns the red disc of the setting sun and supported by two serpents wearing the pschent and swelling out their hoods, showed on the bosom of the figure its monstrous form full of symbolic meaning. Lower down, in the spaces left free by the crossed zones, and rayed with brilliant colours representing bandages, the vulture of Phra, crowned with a globe, with outspread wings, the body covered with symmetrically ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... that his pupil should understand this or that particular, he would be speculating on Euphra's behaviour, trying to account for this or that individual look or tone, or seeking, perhaps, a special symbolic meaning in some general remark that she had happened to let fall. Meanwhile, poor Harry would be stupifying himself with work which he could not understand for lack of some explanation or other that ought to have been given him weeks ago. Still, however, ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... pink fan, a faint golden glow. She might have been transmuted from flesh into some fine metal. George had not heard the Major's name for her, "Mademoiselle Midas," but he had a feeling that the little golden figure was symbolic—here was the real Golden Girl for him—not Madge or ...
— The Trumpeter Swan • Temple Bailey
... into Rome was the most theatrical event that occurred during the reign of Alexander VI. Processions were the favorite spectacles of the Middle Ages; State, Church, and society displayed their wealth and power in magnificent cavalcades. The horse was symbolic of the world's strength and magnificence, but with the disappearance of knighthood it lost its place in the history of civilization. How the love of form and color of the people of Italy—the home of processions—has changed was shown in Rome, July 2, 1871, when Victor Emmanuel entered ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... book and the ceremony proceeded. Just as Miss Lavendar and Stephen Irving were pronounced man and wife a very beautiful and symbolic thing happened. The sun suddenly burst through the gray and poured a flood of radiance on the happy bride. Instantly the garden was alive with dancing shadows ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Bishops. But it is all many years ago now, and directly after the marriage, as though in the vain hope of concealing every trace of his offence, Johann Orth purchased a little German ship, which he called by the symbolic name of Santa Margherita—for St. Margaret suffered martyrdom for the sin of rejecting a ruler's dishonourable proposals—and so they sailed for South America. By what means the wedded fugitives purposed there to support ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... in that tone of voice which always puzzled even my mother to be sure whether he was in jest or earnest, "in all these fables certain philosophers could easily discover symbolic significations of the highest morality. I have myself written a treatise to prove that Puss in Boots is an allegory upon the progress of the human understanding, having its origin in the mystical schools of the Egyptian priests, and evidently an ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... purposes that are clear in definition and for work that is intense. There are no prizes offered for excellent work, but the approbation of parents, teachers, and schoolmates, in the estimation of the pupils, far transcends any material or symbolic prizes that could be offered. In school work and in conduct the pupils all strive to win this approval. There is no coarseness nor boorishness, for that would forfeit this approval. The cigarette is under ban, for public sentiment is ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... All true art is symbolic; a thought, an idea, must always constitute the significance, the soul of its outward form. The mere delusive imitations, the servile copyings of the actual shapes of reality, are not the proper objects of art. To form a master work of art, the idea symbolized must be pure and noble; the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... They thus receive the vocation of expressing it, and must be interpreted as if the spiritual idea were actually present in them. It is indeed true that natural objects possess an aspect which makes them capable of representing a universal meaning, but in symbolic art a complete correspondence is not yet possible. In it the correspondence is confined to an abstract quality, as when, for example, a lion is meant to stand ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... of the Camp Fire Girls of America, I place on the little finger of your left hand this ring, with its design of seven fagots, symbolic of the seven points of the law of the Fire, which you have expressed your desire to follow, and of the three circles on either side, symbolic of the three watchwords of this organization—Work, Health, and ...
— A Campfire Girl's First Council Fire - The Camp Fire Girls In the Woods • Jane L. Stewart
... think, but birth and death we particularly cover and hide, concealing from our friends with conventional phrases, lying about to our children. Over the strong ever-lasting life-processes, we spin veil on veil; drape and smother them till they become sufficiently remote and symbolic for the ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... the artist seemed to look triumphantly through the solemn, purplish blue eyes of the young martyr, and Beryl knew that her own heart beat under the pamted folds of the diploidion; that she had epitomized in a symbolic picture, the history ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... been thy conquest o'er the past, Stemming Oblivion's torrent by thy might, Reading symbolic records long o'ercast By the deep shadows of unbroken night; Tracing with reverent finger names of kings That long had ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... East and West. A new cotton country, the best in the world, was discovered in America. Cotton invaded England and after a hard fight, with fists as well as finance, wool was beaten in its chief stronghold. Cotton became King and the wool-sack in the House of Lords lost its symbolic significance. ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... accommodation in proportion to space. But coast-line is not enough; land and sea must be wedded as well as approximated. The Doge of Venice went annually forth to wed the Adriatic in behalf of its queen, and to cast into its bosom the symbolic ring; but Nature alone can really join the hands of ocean and main. By bays, estuaries, ports, spaces of sea lovingly inclosed by arms of sheltering shore, are conversation and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... true," Juba said. "But why must this be done, Mother? This is a silly ceremony, a thing for children, this symbolic trial. Can we not just say, 'Now Juba is a woman,' without having to humiliate this poor Man, who after ...
— Step IV • Rosel George Brown
... as it were, symbolic use of genealogical chants occurs over and over again. That the series is often of emotional rather than of historical value is suggested by the wordplays and by the fact that the hero tales do not show what is so characteristic of Icelandic saga—a care to record the ancestry ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... any nation on earth. They wanted to "fire the Southern heart," and make sure of the secession of Virginia by "sprinkling blood in the people's faces," and so they opened their batteries upon the fort. After a long waiting, which was "symbolic of the patience, endurance, and long suffering of the Northern people," the fort replied, and the war between Union and Disunion, freedom and slavery, was fairly begun. Major Anderson knew from the first that this battle could end but in one way, and when his ...
— True To His Colors • Harry Castlemon
... of Persia and the great days of the Sassanides, in Kurush, who destroys the Median Empire, and spreads wider the religion of the vanquished, the religion of Zerdusht, the symbolic worship of flame, loveliest of inanimate things—even there no sustained, no deliberate effort towards an ideal amongst the peoples beneath the Persian sway can be discovered. Islam starts with religious aspirations, the most lofty, the most beneficent, but the purity ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... then we had fruits, bananas and apples and pears, cut up in pieces, each with a toothpick in it so it can be eaten easily. Then we had a soup made of fish's stomach, or air sac. Then we had a pudding of the most delicious sort imaginable, made of a mold of rice filled in with eight different symbolic things that I don't know anything about, but they don't cut much part in the taste. In serving this dish we were first given a little bowl half full of a sauce thickened and looking like a milk sauce. It was really made of powdered almonds. Into this you put the pudding, and it is so good that ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey
... up to his yellow hair, and his eyes were burning feverishly. As he said he had an intuition, and it had risen to a sort of lightheaded certainty. Resuming his symbolic taps, he signalled to his friend, "You scarcely realise how poetic my intuition is. It has that sudden quality we sometimes feel ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... Urspr. u. Sinnd. Abendmahls, 1893). He sees in the supper as not instituted, but celebrated by Jesus, the festival of the Messianic meal, the anticipated triumph over death, the expression of the perfection of the Messianic work, the symbolic representation of the filling of believers with the powers of the Messianic kingdom and life. The reference to the Passover and the death of Christ was attached to it later, though it is true very soon. How much is thereby explained that was hitherto obscure—critical, historical, and dogmatico-historical ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... the stream, you—Individual you; but Man (from whence you come) has found out an art for crossing it. This art is the building of bridges. And hence man in the general may properly be called Pontifex, or "The Bridge Builder"; and his symbolic summits of office ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... in symbolic or application-oriented form instead of computer language. This enables management to communicate more easily with the ...
— IBM 1401 Programming Systems • Anonymous
... by a screen carrying a large rood carved in oak. Like St. Michael's, but to a smaller extent, the axis of the choir inclines to the north. Whether symbolic, or only a part of what may be described as the studied irregularity of the whole building it is hard to say. The column on each side of the choir is later than the east respond and also later than the west tower pier, but corresponds with the east tower pier. ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Churches of Coventry - A Short History of the City and Its Medieval Remains • Frederic W. Woodhouse
... been resolved into mere allegorized ideas. And a learned friend has undertaken to prove, within the next 50 years, according to the best rules of modern scepsis, that no such banker as Mr. Rothschild ever existed; that the word Rothschild in fact was nothing more than a symbolic expression for a habit of advancing loans at the beginning of the 19th century: which indeed the word itself indicates, if reduced to its roots. I should not be surprized to hear that some man had undertaken to demonstrate the non-existence ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... upward spring upon my waistcoat, at least once at each of our meetings. He had neglected that ceremony this time notwithstanding my correct and even conventional conduct in offering him a cake; it seemed to me symbolic of my final separation from the Fyne household. And I remembered against him how on a certain day he had abandoned poor Flora de Barral—who was ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... inspiration and that those who embraced his doctrine received direct communication from the Almighty. He disdained formal creeds and all manner of church organizations, declaring sectarian names to be marks of the beast and all church members to be in Babylon. He introduced re-baptism as a symbolic cleansing from sectarian stains, and after some months advanced a proposition that his flock hold all things in common. He put a sudden end to the solemn "deaconing-out" and droning of psalm tunes and grafted on to his form of worship lively singing and marching ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... distinctly to the symbolic, the parabolic, allegoric, dreamy and mystical—to treatment of the world as an array of weird or half-fanciful existences, witnessing only to certain dim spiritual facts or abstract moralities, occasionally inverted moralities—"tail ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... sight-seeing world I had seen. It was the Memnon's head, then recently brought from Egypt. I looked at it, as the reader must suppose, in order to understand the depth which I have here ascribed to the impression, not as a human but as a symbolic head; and what it symbolized to me were: 1. The peace which passeth all understanding. 2. The eternity which baffles and confounds all faculty of computation; the eternity which had been, the eternity which ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... These mural decorations have all disappeared. History and portraiture seem to have been the prevailing subjects; a secular art corresponding to the social ideals of Confucianism. Yet long before the introduction of Buddhism (A.D. 67) with its images and pictures, we find that the two great symbolic figures of the Chinese imagination, the Tiger and the Dragon—typifying the forces of Nature and the power of the Spirit—had been evolved in art; and to imaginative minds the mystic ideas of Lao Tzue and the legends of his hermit followers proved a fruitful field for artistic motives ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... own deck-passengers, who seemed to recognize the proper shrines by a sort of devotional instinct, and were soon wholly absorbed in their prayers and prostrations. It is very evident to me that the Russian race requires the formulas of the Eastern Church; a fondness for symbolic ceremonies and observances is far more natural to its character than to the nations of Latin or Saxon blood. In Southern Europe the peasant will exchange merry salutations while dipping his fingers in the holy water, or turn in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... worshipped by royal figures, or, as I have just said, guarded by genii in an attitude of adoration, it is incontrovertibly one of the loftiest of religious emblems; and what places this character beyond doubt is, that we often see above the plant the symbolic image of the Supreme God, the winged disc—surmounted or not by a human bust. The cylinders of Babylonian or Assyrian workmanship present this emblem no less frequently than the bas-reliefs of Assyrian palaces, and always under the same conditions, and ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various |
